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“I SAT there one day reflecting on all the people I had screwed over in the pursuit of success.” This fed-up Aussie set of for life of travel, arriving in his latest destination with just $7 in his pocket.

Shanghai - one of the fastest-growing mega-cities- was grown by immigrants. Picture: Getty Source: National Features

THE secret world of the old Shanghai bomb shelter seems to exist in a parallel universe.

On the sun-splashed street above, migrant labourers slurp rice and tofu lunches, while clusters of office workers in crisp white shirts walk past the small sign on the sidewalk. But in the dark recess behind a display of foreign-brand toilet seats, a young woman descends a staircase into a place she knows only as "0093".

Passing through a pair of metal blast doors, the woman - 22-year-old Sheng Jiahui, who goes by the nickname Sammy - moves deep into dimly lit corridors. The bunker glows an unnatural shade of green. In its perpetual twilight, 0093 still evokes the communist revolution that snuffed out Shanghai's heyday, when the mingling of East and West transformed the city into the Paris of the Orient.

A door cracks open, and a blast of electric guitar erupts into the corridor. Inside the small room, four young Shanghainese women - the other members of Sammy's punk rock band, Black Luna - are starting to jam.

The rehearsal rooms at 0093 have helped incubate more than 100 local bands, reinvigorating a culture that now, as before, blurs the East-West divide.

The daughter of a traditional Shanghainese opera singer, Sammy is taking her family's musical talent in a new direction.

"We are newborn birds but we have big dreams," she cries. "Let the whole world hear us sing."

In Shanghai, one of the fastest-growing megacities in the world, it's easy to get lost in the relentless percussion of jackhammers and bulldozers. The rise of China's only truly global city, however, is driven not by machines but by an urban culture that follows its own beat - embracing the new and the foreign even as it seeks to reclaim its past glory.

Shanghai natives form an urban tribe, set apart from the rest of China by language, customs, architecture, food and attitudes.

Their culture, often called haipai, emerged from the city's singular history as a meeting point of foreign merchants and Chinese migrants.

"In foreigners' eyes Shanghai is part of 'mysterious China'," says Zhou Libo, a local comedian. "In the eyes of other Chinese, Shanghai is part of the outside world."

An upstart by Chinese standards, Shanghai - unlike imperial Beijing - was just a modest fishing town a century and a half ago.

In the beginning it was a foreign dream, a Western treaty port trading opium for tea and silk. The muscular buildings along the riverfront known as the Bund projected foreign, not Chinese, power.

From around the world came waves of immigrants, creating an exotic stew of British bankers and Russian dancing girls, American missionaries and French socialites, Jewish refugees and Sikh security guards.

By the 1930s, Shanghai was one of the 10 largest cities in the world: a mixed-blood metropolis with a reputation for easy money - and easier morals. The British, French and Americans carved the city into concessions, building gracious homes along tree-lined streets.

Shops carried the latest fashions. The racecourse dominated the centre of town, while the city's nightlife offered everything from dance halls to opium dens and brothels.

The whole enterprise, however, rested on the several million Chinese immigrants who flooded the city, many of them refugees fleeing violent campaigns in the countryside, beginning in the mid-1800s with the bloody Taiping Rebellion. The new arrivals found protection in Shanghai and set to work as merchants and middlemen, coolies and gangsters.

For all the hardships, these migrants forged the country's first modern urban identity.

Family traditions may have remained Confucian, but the dress was Western and the system unabashedly capitalist, and the favourite soup, borscht, came from Russians escaping the Bolsheviks.

"We've always been accused of worshipping foreigners," says Shen Hongfei, one of Shanghai's leading cultural critics. "But taking foreign ideas and making them our own made us the most advanced place in China."

The curtain finally came down in 1949. For the next four decades, China's socialist overlords made Shanghai suffer. Besides forcing the economic elite to leave and suppressing the local dialect, Beijing took almost all the city's revenue.

When China's economic reforms began in the 1980s, Shanghai had to wait almost a decade before the regime in Beijing allowed it to develop.

Fuelled by years of growth faster than China's as a whole - and a culture now unshackled and dealing comfortably with the outside world - the city is eager to recapture the glories of the past, on its own terms.

Twenty years ago, the European buildings on the Bund stared across the Huangpu River at farmland dotted by factories; now that land bristles with skyscrapers, including the 101-storey World Financial Centre.

The city has added more than 4000 high-rises and almost 2400km of roads.

But Xiangming Chen, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, says: "The city can't just build its way to greatness. The bigger question is, how does it rebuild a sense of community that's been lost in tearing down the old and building up the new?"

Jin Qijing pretends not to notice the rat scurrying across the pipe in her room. Dinner is on the table - a sweet and fatty braised-pork dish, hongshaorou, that is a Shanghainese favourite - and the elegant 91-year-old doesn't want to spoil the family meal.

No one needs to remind Jin that conditions in her traditional Shanghai neighbourhood, or lilong, have deteriorated since she moved here as a teenager in 1937. Back then her lilong - one of thousands in Shanghai that set modified Chinese courtyard houses on tight European-style lanes - lived up to its name: Baoxing Cun, or "treasure and prosperity village".

One family lived in each house, often with a coterie of servants and rickshaw pullers. Today, eight families cram into Jin's two-storey home, one family per room. There is no plumbing. Jin's kitchen is an electric stove on a makeshift balcony.

Shanghai's old neighbourhoods are disappearing. In 1949, at least three-quarters of Shanghainese lived in lilong; today only a fraction do. But Baoxing Cun's densely packed alleyways still evoke the communal feeling that made lilong the cradle of Shanghainese culture.

Shanghai has taken more care than most Chinese cities to preserve its historic architecture, yet only a few lilong appear on the list of protected areas. Ruan Yisan, a professor of urban planning at Tongji University, is waging a campaign to save these living repositories of Shanghai culture.

"The Government should demolish poverty, not history," he says.

"There's nothing wrong with improving people's lives, but we shouldn't throw our heritage away like a pair of old shoes."

Following the crowd has never been Zhang Xin's way. Born in a Shanghai lilong during the Cultural Revolution, the 42-year-old conceptual artist likes to jolt audiences with images of Chinese intellectuals as birds trapped in a cage.

"We suffer from the psychology of colonialism," she says.

"We act proud that we were worthy of being colonised."

It surprised some of her friends, then, that Zhang joined the stampede into the suburbs. Several million Shanghainese have moved out of the city's core in the past 15 years. Zhang's family lives in a three-bedroom apartment amid a cluster of high-rises with manicured lawns and a playground for her seven-year-old daughter, Jiazhen. Yet neighbours in suburbia rarely know each other well, despite community-building efforts such as sports leagues.

For Zhang, the allure of the suburbs soon waned. The artist and her family plan to move back downtown. The ostensible reason is to enrol Jiazhen in a top school, but Zhang also wants to give her daughter a deeper sense of identity.

"All of my best memories come from the sounds I heard as a six-year-old waking up in the lilong," she says. "The chattering on the street, the vendors selling shrimp - real life."

Chen Dandan works hundreds of metres above Shanghai, building one of the city's skyscrapers. What gives the 26-year-old a sense of vertigo, though, is his daily walk home down Nanjing Rd, the city's glitziest shopping street. In soiled blue overalls, Chen ogles a Ferrari whose price tag equals about 80 years of his annual income. "All these people may have money," he says, "but we are the ones who are building Shanghai."

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